Games, toys, play structures, and other similar entertainment systems are well known for providing play and interaction among users, whether children or adults. A variety of commercially available play toys, stories, and games are also known for providing valuable learning as well as entertainment opportunities for children and adults, such as role playing, reading, memory stimulation, physical coordination, and the like.
While there are many games, stories, and toys that provide for participants to choose their own ending to a story and for multiplayer online games in which several participants engage in an entertainment system simultaneously and affect one another's experience, there is a lack in the industry of an entertainment system that allows users to follow the individual character(s) of one or more stories within a larger whole involving interwoven stories, to provide feedback regarding, and otherwise engage with, the stories, to interact directly with one or more characters of the stories (as if the characters were real people), to interact with other users and to potentially alter the story of one or more particular characters. Users will be able to communicate with the characters as if the characters were real people. Therefore, a need exists for an online computer or other interactive medium format that provides both an individual entertainment experience (through each user reading and potentially interacting with, in one or more of the ways outlined above, one or more stories within the system with the opportunity to participate in the game component of the entertainment) and a multi-participant experience, whereby users can communicate with one another in various ways and can view the results of other users' participation, and the impact of that participation on individual stories.